Removing chrome, plus more Safari tricks

Just mentioned in a comment here, but worth repeating since a couple people had asked about the “skin” on Safari shown in my screen shots.

It’s actually not a skin but a “chrome-less” version of Safari, courtesy of a great little app called Safari Enhancer. It lets you—among many things—remove the aluminum/chrome look from Safari. It also lets you hack up things like link style and colors, deactivate the cache, and import bookmarks from a bunch of different browsers. Most importantly perhaps, it can enable a debugging menu under which a wealth of fantastic features await you. (How about “Open this page in Firefox” and “Change my user agent to ‘IE 5’”? Great stuff.)

As long as we’re off on a Safari day, I’ll also mention the other Safari tools I swear by.

Pith Helmet - Ad and pop up control. Note I said “control” not “blocking” although it does that too. A truly extraordinary app whose 2.x release lets you control incredibly minute preferences per site, including custom style sheet application and cookie policies. Literally, the first thing I load on top of a fresh OSX install.

SafariStand - I’m still getting a feel for everything this does, but I can recommend it on a single feature: source code coloring. So much nicer. Lets you automatically group downnloads by date. Also features its own very sexy bookmark functionality that I haven’t spent much time with. Looks great, though.

One that’s pretty popular with the kids that I don’t currently use is Saft, a plug-in that does Sogudi-like location bar searches, full-screen browsing, kiosk mode, and more. Lot of folks swear by it.

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